Claiming His Shock Heir Read online

  She looked at him and knew that he was. Once she had thought she loved him and once too he had thought he loved her, but it had all been a long time ago, an adolescent romance for her, a summer affair for him, both of them poised on the brink of other things with a summer to spare, but she had hurt his pride when she threw his love back in his face, and it showed in his eyes that he had not forgiven her.

  ‘Scott.…’ She took a step towards him and saw his instant recoil and knew that the plea which had been on her lips to let the past lie could not be uttered. He wanted it to remain alive; he wanted to punish her, and could she really blame him? She had told him she loved him and then she had gone to tell him that she had made a mistake and that she loved someone else. He had every right to resent, perhaps even hate her, whilst she.…

  ‘Mum.…’ She came out of her thoughts to find Simon watching her. Sometimes he saw too much and worried her with his maturity.

  ‘Go upstairs, Simon,’ she told him. ‘You still haven’t packed, and I want to leave as soon as possible.’

  When he had gone she faced Scott, neither asking him to come in or preventing him from doing so. This house which had been her aunt’s belonged to the estate and would revert to it with her death, and Scott had every right to walk into it with or without her permission.

  ‘I’m sorry about your car.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Simon doesn’t tell lies, and we haven’t been here long enough for him to know that the estate is private.…’

  ‘What are you trying to say? That he was misled? He’s how old? Twelve? Thirteen?’

  ‘Ten.’ Red flags of colour sprang into her cheeks. Scott knew exactly how old Simon was, damn him.

  ‘He looks much older. Our magistrates are rather old-fashioned around here. They take a dim view of damage to private property. As well as the damage to the car there’ll probably be a hefty fine to pay, always supposing of course that they accept this as a first offence.’

  First offence! Philippa’s body went cold. ‘It was an accident,’ she said desperately. ‘You.…’

  ‘Can you prove that? I could claim that it was malicious damage. I thought you were never going to come back here, Philippa. I thought your lover was going to take you away… somewhere glamorous.… The south of France I believe you said.… How long did it take him to realise what a cheat you were? Not long, to judge from the speed with which he left you. He was back at Woolverton by Christmas and married the following spring to Mary Tatlow. Your aunt was very disappointed in you, Philippa. She did say that she never wanted to see you again if I remember correctly.’

  ‘I was her only relative, when she died I.…’

  ‘Came back out of a sense of loyalty to her, is that what you’re trying to say?’ he jeered, anger splintering through the cold façade he had adopted towards her. ‘Don’t try to make me believe that. I know exactly how much your loyalty is worth.…’

  ‘Scott, I.…’

  ‘You what? Made a mistake? When did you discover that? When Geoff refused to marry you despite the fact that you were carrying his bastard child? No wonder you left so quickly. It was quite a nine-day wonder, I can tell you, especially as he left at the same time. “There’s someone else,” you told me in that cool, butter wouldn’t melt voice. “I can’t marry you, Scott… I love someone else…” and then you left… cool as the proverbial cucumber… after you told me you were carrying his child. Have you any idea what you did to me? Have you?’ he demanded savagely… ‘I’d defied my grandfather for you. I was even prepared to leave Garston… to give up everything for you. But I wasn’t enough for you, was I? As soon as you found out that my grandfather would disinherit me if we married, you dropped me flat and took up with Geoff Rivers. Did you tell him that I was the one who had your virginity or didn’t he care? He ran out on you in the end though, didn’t he, Philippa? He left you, carrying his child … alone… and you’ll never know just how much pleasure knowing that gave me.…’

  ‘I think I can guess.’ She sounded calm but she had gone paper white. The force of his anger pounded against her in waves, battering against her defences, forcing her to remember things she would rather forget; that final scene with him; the pain that followed.…

  ‘Yes, you always were quite quick on the uptake.… So quick that I still find it hard to understand why you ever let me make love to you in the first place. If you’d still been a virgin you might have got more out of Geoff than a bastard child… as it was, you’d have been hard put to prove which of us was the father.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She could feel hysteria building up inside her, an aching, panicky pain she remembered from long ago and which she had kept deliberately at bay in the years that followed.

  ‘Then what do you want to talk about? How you’re going to pay for the repairs to my car? My car, Philippa, not Computex’s.… Oh yes, Computex belongs to me. I made good after all you see.… You should have stuck with me; despite being disinherited I made it after all. My godfather helped me, and with that and a large slice of good luck I managed to hold on to Garston. Just think if you hadn’t run out on me you’d be mistress of us both now… Garston and me… I always did wonder which of us meant the most to you.…’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘No, of course not. I was forgetting about Geoff. How easily you deceived me.… Did you enjoy it, you bitch, letting me think you loved me when all the time…?’

  ‘Scott… about your car.’ She wet her lips nerving herself for the admission she had to make. ‘I’m afraid that I… I just don’t have that sort of money.…’

  ‘How very unfortunate for you.… So… what do you suggest I do? Simply wipe it off—put it down to “experience”?’ He shook his head, baring his teeth slightly in a vulpine grimace. ‘You’ve already cost me far too much under that heading. ‘Oh, no,’ he said softly, ‘this time I’m going to do some recouping. You made a laughing stock out of me eleven years ago, Philippa, and now it’s my turn to turn the screw a little.’

  ‘Simon! You can’t punish him because.…’

  ‘Who said anything about punishing the boy? It’s you I want to punish, Philippa. You who’s going to pay, and if you can’t pay in cash then you’re going to have to pay in kind, as they say.’

  A kind of numb terror seemed to hold her in its grip, a complete inability to reason logically, a primeval dread that made it impossible for her to shake off the spell Scott’s voice was weaving round her. All she knew was that Scott had the power to hurt her son, and that somehow she must stop him from doing so no matter what the cost to herself.

  ‘Scott, please.…’

  ‘Please what? Spare your son? Very well… but only at a price, Philippa.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You work as a secretary in London I understand, for Merrit Plastics.’

  Philippa nodded her head, perplexed both by his question and the fact that he knew so much about her.

  ‘You will give your notice in and come and work for me here at Garston.’

  ‘As your secretary?’

  ‘That…’ he paused and added significantly, ‘and other things.’ Blood stormed her face as he looked at her, assessing and stripping her, making his meaning all too plain.

  ‘Never.’

  The bitter denial reverberated between them, his eyes darkening, going cold and hard as he breathed softly, ‘Think again, Philippa… I’ve ached for an opportunity like this, an opportunity to get even with you and humiliate you the way you humiliated me… and now that I’ve got it I won’t let go easily. Either way you make a sacrifice. It’s up to you whether it’s you or your son.…’

  ‘But I can’t work for you and.…’

  ‘Share my bed? Of course you can, isn’t it what you did for Rivers? You were working for him when you started sleeping with him weren’t you? A holiday job I believe you called it. I want your answer and I want it now, Philippa, otherwise I’m taking your son to the police to make a statement. I doubt they’ll let him
off leniently.’

  ‘Scott, don’t make me do this… I’ve got Simon to think of. I can’t.…’

  ‘You can and you will, and if the boy doesn’t know what manner of woman his mother is by now, I suspect it’s time he found out. Don’t try to tell me that Geoff was the last man in your life. A woman like you who takes two lovers at a time could never.…’

  He caught her hand as it arched towards his face, grasping her wrist painfully, making her cry out with the numbing agony that shot down her arm.

  ‘Make your mind up, Philippa. Either you come to me and let me use you for whatever purpose I desire, or I take your son to the police.…’

  What choice did she really have? Her very silence confirmed her submission, and as she looked up and saw the triumph glittering in Scott’s eyes she recognised that either she had never really known him, or the man she had known was gone for ever. Was she to blame for that? Was she to blame for what Scott seemed to have become—a cold, hard stranger who talked so calmly of revenge, and making her pay, a man who seemed to have no room in his life for either pity or compassion? It seemed that Scott thought she was and she shivered, partly in pain, partly in fear, wondering how she could have miscalculated all those years ago.

  She had been so sure that he would marry Mary; so sure that she had been doing the right thing. So sure… and so wrong. But it was too late to go back now, far far too late.

  She looked into his face and the thought struck her that perhaps if she stayed she might be able to put right the past, to make Scott see that what she had done she had done not to hurt him but because she had thought it was right, not against him but for him, and it was to this tenuous hope that she clung as she said slowly, ‘Very well, Scott … if that’s what you want we’ll stay, but I’ll have to find somewhere to stay… a school for Simon.…’

  ‘What’s the matter with the local grammar school, or isn’t that good enough for Geoff’s bastard? His son, his legitimate son should I say, is down for Harrow, so I’m told, but of course men don’t lay out good money to send their bastards to public school, do they?’ He turned towards the door, and then paused, looking back at her over his shoulder as he said coolly, ‘Don’t worry about finding somewhere to stay, you’ll both be staying at the house with me.…’ He saw the expression in her eyes and laughed softly. ‘Yes, it will cause quite a stir in the village, won’t it, but nothing to the stir we’re going to cause… nothing to the stir you caused when you dropped me and went off with Geoff. You should have heard my grandfather crow after you’d gone.’

  His eyes were bitter and Philippa sensed that Scott was looking back to that time when he first came to Garston and was very much an outsider, very much the unwanted grandson taking the place—usurping the place—of the favourite dead one, his grandfather bitterly resentful of him and taking no pains to conceal his resentment.

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow to take you and the boy up to the house. Don’t try running out on me, Philippa, I’ll come running after you and I won’t be in any mood to be generous.’

  The sound of his car had died away completely before Simon came downstairs. Philippa gave him a shaky smile and he came over to her, putting his arm around her waist, so very like his father in the quiet seriousness of his gaze that her heart ached. She ruffled the dark hair. ‘He’s gone then?’

  ‘Umm.…’

  ‘And he doesn’t know?’

  Something in his tone alerted her, some inner voice urging her to tread carefully. ‘Know what?’

  Simon looked at her directly. ‘That he’s my father,’ he said quietly. ‘You didn’t tell him that I’m his son? I saw it on my birth certificate,’ he told her quickly, ‘ages ago, but it never really clicked until we came here and everyone was Scott Garston this and Scott Garston that.…’ Of course! He had spent far more time in the village than she had, but she had had no idea he knew that Scott was his father. ‘Tell me about it,’ he insisted.

  She supposed she owed him that, and if they were going to stay here.… If? Did she have any choice? And why had she given in? Because of some crazy impulse that there were still happy endings; that the past could be wiped out; that Scott could be made to see.… What?

  She sat down, too wrapped up in her own thoughts for a moment to answer Simon’s questions. When she left Garston she had sworn that she would put Scott out of her mind, but had she ever done? Why, when she hadn’t lacked the opportunities, had she never had a relationship with anyone else? Why had she reacted as she did the moment she saw him? Did she still love him? Did she even know what love was? Certainly not that ridiculous overwhelming emotion; that adolescent self-sacrifice she had felt at seventeen—that had been part hero worship and part adoration, but she wasn’t indifferent to Scott, her senses told her that much, and she would like to wipe out the bitterness, the fierce resentment she saw in his eyes, and to replace it with what? Respect? Love? Who knew? To nurture resentment and anger as long as he had done a man would have to be very powerfully motivated; very powerfully.…

  ‘Come on, Ma, give. I want the whole story,’ Simon warned her.

  ‘Okay then…’ she glanced at her son, so like his father for all that Scott couldn’t see it, and said teasingly, ‘Once upon a time.…’

  CHAPTER TWO

  INCREDIBLY it had had a fairytale quality to it; two lonely young people who had found one another, who had come together, loving and giving without restraint, sharing their thoughts, talking, always talking.… At least that was how it had been at first. She had been in the garden, studying for her ‘A’ levels, Scott had been walking past, and instead of walking past had come in. They had started talking and discovered a mutual love of the Renaissance, and it had gone on from there. He had invited her up to the Hall, she remembered, to see some of the books in the library, including one which charted the history of the old Abbey which had stood where the Hall now stood and which had been a victim of Henry VIII’s nefarious Reformation. And it had continued, companionship giving way to love so sweetly and naturally that it had seemed the most natural, the most beautiful thing in the world. She had never felt a moment’s fear in Scott’s presence; never a moment’s dread, or apprehension.

  The first time he kissed her she had given herself into his keeping absolutely. Her first kiss, but not his, but it had left both of them trembling and she, she remembered, had been the one who had reached out and touched him afterwards; the sun-burned skin of his throat and arms, the angles of his jaw, touching his skin wonderingly whilst he let her, his body held tightly under control. ‘I love you’.

  Which of them had said it first? She couldn’t remember, only that the words seemed to dance round them in the lazy gold of a summer afternoon; that her body yearned for the touch of his; that their mutual loneliness intensified their love. And they were both lonely. She because of her aunt’s strict upbringing, him because he was a newcomer to the village, an unwelcome intruder in his grandfather’s life. His friends from university had gone and he was alone… they were both alone.

  Even before they made love he had told her he wanted to marry her. And she had wanted to marry him and live with him at Garston.

  Right from the start he had confided to her his love for Garston, the house which had become his by death. He knew and sympathised with his grandfather’s views, but that didn’t alter his own feelings for Garston. He worried about how he was going to keep it, where he would find the money to maintain and restore it, and it was with her that he shared his hopes and plans.

  And then there had been his mother, Eve Garston, whom Philippa had liked on sight. Already even then severely disabled by arthritis, Eve had been wholly dependent on her irrascible father-in-law financially. Scott’s father had been an engineer, and with his death the family had lost their source of income. Without the small allowance Jeffrey Garston paid them it would not have been possible for Scott to go to university, he would have had to take a job to support himself and his mother.

  Carefully Philippa
explained all this to her son, watching compassion and understanding add an odd maturity to his youthful features, yielding to a traitorous inner impulse to paint his father for him in knightly colours, because that was how she had remembered him. All through the years she had cherished her memories of Scott, refusing to tarnish them, hugging them to her for comfort in those times when she needed it so badly—when she first arrived in London, virtually penniless; when Simon had been born six months later at the home for unmarried mothers. Jobs had been easier to get in those days and with the help of the people who ran the Home she had learned shorthand and typing at college during her pregnancy, and then afterwards she had found a job, gradually progressing in her career, gradually improving the quality of their lifestyle. It had been a slow and painful progress, but nothing to compare with the pain of leaving Scott.

  ‘Why didn’t he marry you—was it because of me?’ Pain and rejection mingled in the grey eyes so like her own.

  ‘No.’ Philippa reassured him quickly, ‘No, it was nothing like that. Scott wanted to marry me before… before I was having you, and…’ she bit her lip, forcing herself to speak calmly, ‘and if he’d known you were his nothing would have stopped him from marrying me… but I told him that someone else was your father.’

  She saw the shock darkening Simon’s eyes and rushed into an explanation. ‘It was for his sake, Simon. His grandfather bitterly resented him and the fact that he would inherit Garston, but Scott loved it.…’

  ‘More than he loved you?’

  ‘Not more, just in a different way, and then there was his mother, Eve.’ She sighed. ‘She suffered from arthritis and needed an operation to help her to walk again. She would have had to wait years to have it done on the National Health but Scott’s grandfather had promised to pay for her to have it done privately. He found out that Scott and I were in love and he sent for me.’

  Her eyes darkened unwittingly as she remembered that day. The message had arrived just after breakfast, and her aunt had compressed her mouth angrily. She hadn’t known anything about her relationship with Scott and had assumed that Philippa was being summoned for some other crime like riding her bike too close to the main gates. In many ways Jeffrey Garston was positively feudal, one of the conditions that went with Jane’s tenancy of the cottage was that she and her niece used the narrow back road to and from their home; that they ‘kept to their place’.